1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention relates to methods of website optimisation for a website hosted on a server system, as well as to related server systems, to related computer software, and to computer terminals in communication with related server systems.
2. Technical Background
Communications network-based marketers are frequently seeking answers to, and are essentially guided by, two very related questions, namely, “Who are my customers” and “What do they need from my business?”
The first of these questions has typically been addressed with the use of statistical modelling techniques as part of tailor-made solutions for businesses, using decades-old toolsets for data clustering. These tools vary in their degree of flexibility and adaptability, but most of them rely on specifying beforehand the number of segments that the customer base should be split into, no matter what is the actual number and consistency of naturally occurring segments. In addition, the solutions offered rely mostly on offline data from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) databases and further analysis is needed in order to incorporate and take into account data from different channels, such as online clickstream and online user-profile data. This is a painstaking process, which takes time and typically costs significant amounts to businesses of any size, as the complexity of the task increases with the size of the dataset.
Crucially, these methods can only attempt to answer the second question using best-fit models that necessarily make numerous assumptions on the likely behaviour of a business's customer base. At the end of this process, marketers still need to supplement the analysis with their own customer profiling, without having been given any objective ‘ranking’ of importance or relevance of customers in each segment, according to a natural and emergent property. In brief, marketers are not basing their customer profiling directly on the underlying data but instead need to add various assumptions to the analysis.
3. Discussion of Related Art
EP1004967B1 discloses a method and system for employing image recognition techniques to produce a photocollage from a plurality of images wherein the system obtains a digital record for each of the plurality of images, assigns each of the digital records a unique identifier and stores the digital records in a database; automatically sorts the digital records using at least one date type to categorize each of the digital records according at least one predetermined criteria; employs means responsive to the sorting step to compose a photocollage from the digital records. The method and system employ data types selected from pixel data; metadata; product order information; processing goal information; or customer profile to automatically sort data typically by culling or grouping to categorize according to either an event, a person, or chronologically. Hence EP1004967B1 discloses a method of grouping, the method employing customer profile data.